Written by Marc D. Goldfinger on Dec. 28, 2000, published by Spare Change News in April, 2001.

“If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier — just so long as I’m the dictator,” —George Walker Bush said, sending ripples of laughter through the room.—–a joke from the lips of our soon to be President of the United States, December 18, 2000.

Colour this by numbers. George W. Jr. was the director of Harken Energy of Dallas, Texas and a major stockholder of that corporation. Can it be that he knew nothing when he dumped $848,560 worth of its stock only one week prior to a poor earnings report that sent it’s stock tumbling? Is insider trading okay?

Okay, let’s move to the present. There was a telephone call placed from Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris’s cell phone to Boy George W.’s mansion at 11:50pm election night. Harris said she never made the call, that Al Cardenas, chairman of the state Republican Party, borrowed the phone and made the call.

The other story told was that Dan Bartlett said the Florida Secretary of State’s website went down and old Jeb(Bush), who was in Austin on November 7th, called Harris. Then Katherine returned the call.

There are a lot of stories. There are stories about Black voters not being able to vote. Then there are the “chad” stories. Then there are the Republicans storming the (vote)counting houses in Broward County(Florida) stories.

Here’s an interesting story I pulled off the internet.

“A Zimbabwe politician was quoted as saying that children should study the U.S. election event closely because it shows that election fraud is not only a third world phenomena. To illustrate the point, he made the following comments:

“Imagine that we read of an election occurring anywhere in the third world in which the self-declared winner was the son of the former Prime Minister and that former Prime Minister was himself the former head of that nation’s secret police/intelligence agency.

“Imagine that the self-declared winner lost the popular vote but won based on some old colonial holdover from the nation’s pre-democracy past (the Electoral College).

“Imagine that the self-declared winner’s ‘victory’ turned on disputed votes cast in a Province governed by his brother!

“Imagine that the poorly drafted ballots of one district, a district heavily favoring the self-declared winner’s opponent, led thousands of voters to vote for the wrong candidate.

“Imagine that members of that nation’s most despised caste, fearing for their livelihoods, turned out in record numbers to vote in near-universal opposition to the self-declared winner’s candidacy. Imagine that hundreds of members of that most-despised caste were intercepted on their way to the polls by state police operating under the authority of the self-declared winner’s brother.

“Imagine that six thousand people voted in the disputed Province and that the self-declared winner’s lead was only 327 votes. Fewer, certainly, than the vote counting machines’ margin of error.

“Imagine that the self-declared winner and his political party opposed a more careful by-hand inspection and re-counting of the ballots in the disputed Province or in its most hotly disputed district.

“Imagine that the self-declared winner, himself a Governor of a major Province, had the worst human rights record of any Province in his nation and his Province actually led the nation in executions.

“Imagine that a major campaign promise of the self-declared winner was to appoint like-minded human rights violators to lifetime positions on the high court of that nation.

“None of us would deem such an election to be representative of anything other than the self-declared winner’s will-to-power. All of us, I imagine, would wearily turn the page thinking that it was another sad tale of a third world country.”

Now imagine that the President-Select was voted in by a majority of 5 from the high court of 9, the Chief Justice (Rehnquist) being a man who owned two homes, one in Phoenix and one in Vermont, that existed in developments that prohibited, by contract, selling to Blacks and Jews, by another Justice (Scalia) who called affirmative action “the most evil fruit of a fundamentally bad seed”, and, last but certainly not least, a justice (Thomas) who was selected for the high court by the President-Select’s father.

From other news sources — “Human-caused stresses, including global warming and over fishing, are encouraging jellyfish surpluses in many tourist destinations and productive fisheries”—-National Science Foundation.

Some problem areas are off the coasts of Australia, the Gulf of Mexico, Hawaii, the Black Sea, Namibia, Britain, the Mediterranean, the Sea of Japan, and the Yangtze estuary.

Jellyfish thrive in areas that are compromised by pollution, but not in the increasing number of Dead Zones where nothing can live, and are dramatically increasing in number.

Dead Zones are waters that are so depleted of oxygen that they cannot support life and there are over 400 of them, that we know of, and they are increasing in size.

The world’s largest Dead Zone is in the Baltic Sea and it loses 1.3 million metric tons of food a year.

It sounds as if our oceans are becoming close relations to our currently disintegrating stock market. Many of the Dead Zones are caused by global run-off of agricultural fertilizers from our giant agri-farms and also, believe it or not, from polluted air. Everything is connected.

The Earth was not ready for our throw-away human way of life. It is imperative that the new leaders of all countries make themselves aware of what needs to be done to save the Earth from our dysfunctional ways of life.

War, fossil fuel misuse, over-population, greed. Our species feels entitled to whatever it can take from the Earth and disregards the cost to other species, the oceans, the air, and the fresh water ways that are being degraded by the garbage we pour into it.

When a civilization collapses, it isn’t pretty. Stock market crashes are just the tip of the iceberg. It takes more than one man leading a country to solve the problems we face.

If the United States were to elect Barack Obama, and it would be in our best interests to do so, we must lead him to a better way of life. Unfortunately, I believe that John McCain is more concerned with the art of war than in making our world a better place to live. Sarah Palin is just unaware. Period.

Our civilization is facing a crisis that is totally unique. When Rome was falling, another place was rising. When Greece was falling, another place was rising. In today’s times, all of our civilizations are linked together and what we are facing is a global collapse of our civilization.

If we let this happen, the survivors will live in a savage land ruled by the least of us. The barbarians will have won. The sounds of whips and chains will resound around the world for the humans that remain.

Right now, there is much more at stake than a stock market bail-out. So much more. We must rise from our complacency or pay the unimaginable price.

The Four Horsemen, Pestilence, Famine, War, and Death are riding our way. I will close with a poem that was written by an unknown author, unknown to me, in 1764, courtesy of Jose Gouvieaa of The Highway Poets —

English Folk Poem

They hang the man and flog the woman
That steal the goose from off the Common,
But let the greater villain loose
That steals the Common from the goose.

The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the Lords and Ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine.

The poor and wretched don’t escape
If they conspire the law to break;
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law.

The law locks up the man and woman
who steals the goose from off the Common,
And geese will still a Common lack
Till they go and steal it back.

Why is it that there is always enough money for war, to bail out the rich, but not enough money for healthcare and food for the poor?

Bushvilles are springing up all over the land as our country edges toward collapse. McCain doesn’t have a clue as to what to do; why is it that he is challenging Obama at the polls? Is anybody paying attention to what is real?

The human species is getting ready to take care of itself. The perfect storm is hurtling towards us. Well, the Earth will be better off in the long run.

In Reno, Nevada, a small group of tents populated by homeless people sprang up by the railroad tracks. People with nowhere else to go. Within a short time there were over 150 tents, so close to each other they could barely breathe, filled with people who had come to Reno to look for work.

There was none.

This wasn’t only happening in Reno. It was happening in Seattle, Washington, Athens, Ga., Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland, Cal., and Portland, Oregon. Tent cities being born all over the U.S.A. as the foreclosure explosion took off and the hurricanes hit Texas and Mississippi and the stock market crashed.

This isn’t a recession — it’s a depression and these communities filled with homeless people are the result of the Bush administration’s greedy policies that protect the rich corporations and have no regard for the people.

In the 1930’s they were called Hoovervilles, named after the president of that era. These new tent cities are Bushvilles, directly caused by the policies that have driven our country into 10,000,000,000,000,000 of debt.

Debt caused by the Iraqi War, the corporate bailouts, the sell-outs, the collapse of our infrastructure.

“It’s clear that poverty and homelessness have increased,” said Michael Stoops, acting Director of the National Coalition for the Homeless.

Between the wars, the hurricanes, the business practices of our current regime and the collapsing stock market, we now have The Perfect Storm creating Bushvilles all over the United States.

God help us because it appears that we are not helping ourselves. Well, it seems that the corporate rich are helping themselves to everything and leaving the crumbs for us.

If Barack Obama doesn’t win the election for president, it will be the end of the United States of America. We’ll all live in Bushvilles.

This is just the beginning of the end. As I sit here I ponder the fate of a country that would be foolish enough to elect John McCain and Sarah Palin. True, McCain was a soldier. It is a sad fact that many soldiers are dying and getting shattered by the current wars that our idiot republican president, George W. Bush and his puppet master, Dick Cheney, have lied to lead us astray.

Our country is dying and the new angels of death are McCain and Palen. Elect them and you will be pulling, not an election ballot, but the switch on an instrument of death because they will finish us off.

“Friend and neighbor you have taken away,
my one companion is darkness.”–Psalm 88

Matt Damon thinks the idea of Sarah Palin being a “heartbeat” away from the presidency is “a really terrifying possibility. You do the actuary tables and there’s a one out of three chance that McCain doesn’t survive his first term and it’ll be president Palin.”

“I need to know,” says Matt, “if she really thinks dinosaurs were here 4,000 years ago. I want to know that because she’s going to have the nuclear codes.”

Naturally Palin’s spokesperson called Matt another one of Barack Obama’s celebrity friends who “continue to tear down Governor Palin with little more than blatant name calling.”

It’s more than name calling folks. Sarah Palin is a creationist and Matt Damon is merely quoting what creationists believe.

I’ll give even odds that Sarah Palin doesn’t even know what an actuary table is.

But enough of this. 911. This is the white man’s trail of tears. Truly, it is a sad day for all of us. What human beings do to each other convinces me that we are all insane.